to say, they know never to say too much, and they do the right things.
This bloke was a good bartender.
I sipped my second VM of the afternoon and watched him work, preparing a Bloody Mary mix that he stored in a two-litre plastic bottle; making sure there was enough ice – more than enough ice – in the buckets; slicing lemons and limes; arranging his bottles so the labels faced towards the customer. He had a well-stocked cocktail bar: liqueurs (maraschino, crème de menthe, framboisette and so forth) on the left hand side of the cash register; syrups (grenadine, falernum, orgeat, etc.) and cordials on the right. Up above, on glass shelves in the centre, was the hard stuff, none of it, I’m glad to say, in optics. These bottles were flanked by a huge number of cocktail glasses, some 2 ounces, most 3 or 3½ ounces, and all of them with long stems. You drink certain cocktails without a long-stemmed glass, you’ll fuck up your cocktail. They have to be cold from first sip to last, and that isn’t going to happen if you’ve got your clammy mitts wrapped around a beaker. I recognised some of them: Pousse-Café glasses, Delmonico glasses for Sours, a couple of Julep mugs, and the straight glasses for Highballs and Collinses. At one end of the bar were the glasses he used for Old Fashioneds, the chunky ones, 4 or 5 ounces. I keep a couple of cocktail glasses at home, for when I can be bothered. Seven-ounce bastards. And one fifteen-ounce behemoth for when my intention is to rip my tits down to the bone.
All of this guy’s glasses, his pitchers, stirring rods, strainers and shakers were so clean they could have passed for mint. I sipped my drink and nodded some more. This bar was a nice bar and I was enjoying sitting here and admiring a man who liked his work.
A woman came in wearing a smart black dress. She ordered a glass of Chardonnay and opened her purse. She smiled at me, said something about the weather, about not knowing what it was going to do, or something; I wasn’t hearing her too clearly because the smart black dress and the Grey Goose were kicking around in my head, and I was thinking, no, please, no, not now , but you can’t push it away. You must never push it away, not when it wants to come so strongly, not when, some day it might never come and you’ll wish for it to come back so hard that you’ll pull a muscle, and so:
It was the best day we ever had. And for no crazier reason that everything between us clicked. There was no cinema, no special meal, no day out at the beach. It was just an ordinary day, an ultra-ordinary day, but it was the day that bolted her incontrovertibly on to what it then meant to be me; bolted her so securely that it seemed she had never had a past of her own, never been anything other than mine. The day that, for the first time, I realised I was dumbly, joyously, cripplingly in love with her.
I’d known Rebecca what? A couple of weeks? We’d clashed together a few times after drunken pub nights, or visits down to the woods with bottles of wine and ghetto blasters playing, Christ, what were we listening to back then? In 1994. The Holy Bible, Grace, Hips and Makers . And this particular night we’d been on the cheap Bulgarian red since the afternoon had withdrawn into one corner of the sky. We’d been talking about culture: it had been the buzzword of this particular day. We didn’t get past a couple of sentences without crowbarring it in. We decided we needed to improve ourselves with a bit of culture, so we dressed up. Shirt and tie, smart black dress… Jesus, Rebecca. Jesus Christ.
* * *
It begins.
On to the stage, to the understated applause that only gatherings of this sort can produce, comes a kind-looking man and a wolfish woman wearing a red dress. She sits at a grand piano. He takes an age over the position of his cello before smoothing his hair and taking in the audience while exhaling levelly. Then, with a disconcerting flurry of movement, the instruments
This bloke was a good bartender.
I sipped my second VM of the afternoon and watched him work, preparing a Bloody Mary mix that he stored in a two-litre plastic bottle; making sure there was enough ice – more than enough ice – in the buckets; slicing lemons and limes; arranging his bottles so the labels faced towards the customer. He had a well-stocked cocktail bar: liqueurs (maraschino, crème de menthe, framboisette and so forth) on the left hand side of the cash register; syrups (grenadine, falernum, orgeat, etc.) and cordials on the right. Up above, on glass shelves in the centre, was the hard stuff, none of it, I’m glad to say, in optics. These bottles were flanked by a huge number of cocktail glasses, some 2 ounces, most 3 or 3½ ounces, and all of them with long stems. You drink certain cocktails without a long-stemmed glass, you’ll fuck up your cocktail. They have to be cold from first sip to last, and that isn’t going to happen if you’ve got your clammy mitts wrapped around a beaker. I recognised some of them: Pousse-Café glasses, Delmonico glasses for Sours, a couple of Julep mugs, and the straight glasses for Highballs and Collinses. At one end of the bar were the glasses he used for Old Fashioneds, the chunky ones, 4 or 5 ounces. I keep a couple of cocktail glasses at home, for when I can be bothered. Seven-ounce bastards. And one fifteen-ounce behemoth for when my intention is to rip my tits down to the bone.
All of this guy’s glasses, his pitchers, stirring rods, strainers and shakers were so clean they could have passed for mint. I sipped my drink and nodded some more. This bar was a nice bar and I was enjoying sitting here and admiring a man who liked his work.
A woman came in wearing a smart black dress. She ordered a glass of Chardonnay and opened her purse. She smiled at me, said something about the weather, about not knowing what it was going to do, or something; I wasn’t hearing her too clearly because the smart black dress and the Grey Goose were kicking around in my head, and I was thinking, no, please, no, not now , but you can’t push it away. You must never push it away, not when it wants to come so strongly, not when, some day it might never come and you’ll wish for it to come back so hard that you’ll pull a muscle, and so:
It was the best day we ever had. And for no crazier reason that everything between us clicked. There was no cinema, no special meal, no day out at the beach. It was just an ordinary day, an ultra-ordinary day, but it was the day that bolted her incontrovertibly on to what it then meant to be me; bolted her so securely that it seemed she had never had a past of her own, never been anything other than mine. The day that, for the first time, I realised I was dumbly, joyously, cripplingly in love with her.
I’d known Rebecca what? A couple of weeks? We’d clashed together a few times after drunken pub nights, or visits down to the woods with bottles of wine and ghetto blasters playing, Christ, what were we listening to back then? In 1994. The Holy Bible, Grace, Hips and Makers . And this particular night we’d been on the cheap Bulgarian red since the afternoon had withdrawn into one corner of the sky. We’d been talking about culture: it had been the buzzword of this particular day. We didn’t get past a couple of sentences without crowbarring it in. We decided we needed to improve ourselves with a bit of culture, so we dressed up. Shirt and tie, smart black dress… Jesus, Rebecca. Jesus Christ.
* * *
It begins.
On to the stage, to the understated applause that only gatherings of this sort can produce, comes a kind-looking man and a wolfish woman wearing a red dress. She sits at a grand piano. He takes an age over the position of his cello before smoothing his hair and taking in the audience while exhaling levelly. Then, with a disconcerting flurry of movement, the instruments
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